Tina Makereti's first novel has the same blend of mundane and mythic, homely and heraldic that distinguished her excellent short story collection, Once Upon A Time In Aotearoa.
It follows the lives of two couples, the first joined by a friendship that swells into something much greater, the other by blood ties and history. They learn secrets and destinies that mean shifts of home or allegiance.
In the 1830s, a series of displacements led Ngati Tama and Ngati Mutunga to the Chatham Islands and the subsequent enslavement of indigenous Moriori. The novel begins half a century later, in the Marlborough Sounds, as Mere starts to understand that her affection for childhood friend Iraia has become a more potent emotion. Potent and fraught, since Iraia is descended from a Moriori slave. He's a reminder of an ugly past; a "shadow person".
Four generations after this come the startlingly contrasting twins Bigsy and Lula. Their mother is Maori; their father Pakeha. Or so they think: a more complex lineage gradually reveals itself to them.
The quartet variously escape or move on - to careers; the Great OE and a carved figure that redirects a mind; 1880s Wellington with its teeming wharves, noisome back streets, uneasy reactions to dark skin; to the Chathams, the Land of Mist, and further realisations.
